


Flipping Legacies

by CrimsonWriter



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Marvel, Red Hood: Lost Days, Under the Red Hood
Genre: Beta Needed, Canon Temporary Character Death, Detective Work, Fic is mostly unedited, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, I can't believe that I'm the first person to write Natasha & Jason, I have no idea how far I'll go with this fic, I'm so scared that Jason is OOC, Mentions of Phil Coulson - Freeform, Mentions of Ra's al Ghul being a dick, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Natasha Romanov, Present Tense, Stabilizing influences, That Fic that Literally No One Asked For, The usual warnings for Jason even though we haven't gotten that far yet, canon character death, mentions of the red room
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:28:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23671600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrimsonWriter/pseuds/CrimsonWriter
Summary: When Natasha gets bored, she goes to Gotham and sees how long she can last before Batman finds her and kicks her out. It's simple. It's fun. It's harmless.At least, it was simple until she practically trips over the teenage assassin whipping Gotham's underworld into shape. Then she's spending far too long figuring out which new child-assassin-making organization she has to murder messily."And all of a sudden, she understands what Clint saw when he’d flipped her. It’s an undefinable thing in all the languages she knows: something between terror and anger, salt-the-earth kind of vengeance, but it’d be okay if some of the blood poisoning the soil if their own. A boiling resentment, resigned, desperate, full of terror, furious, and----and a crushing, insidious, hateful piece of hope.Natasha smiles to herself. Coulson flipped Clint. Clint flipped her. Time to continue the legacy."
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Natasha Romanova & Jason Todd, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 149
Kudos: 324





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This has been updated as of April 16th, 2020. Grammar has been corrected, some areas added to, some areas smoothed out. Jason's character is a little more in-character for the time period. :)

It’s been three months since her last mission, and Natasha has gone from enjoying her break between missions to hideously bored, so she draws a bat in red dry-erase on Clint’s calendar and disappears.

Gotham is both hilariously unreal and terrifyingly cruel, which is perfect for Natasha. It’s the kind of reality that she grew up with, and it’s a breath of stale air from long-ago times. It reminds her—not that she needs that particular reminder—on why she stuck with SHIELD, on why she’s inexplicably become friends with Tony Stark.

Superheroes have become the new normal over the last few years. Natasha’s own identity hasn’t been leaked to the wider public, despite her never wearing a mask during their battles. Most of the other heroes have a good idea of what she looks like and her background, though. It suits her purposes, however, so she goes to ground in New York and slowly makes her way to Gotham. It’s become a pasttime for her: how long can she stay in Gotham without getting noticed? 

Batman’s gravel gets drier every time he finds her—and he does find her, which is why Gotham is fun. She thinks that they’re up to thirty-one meetings, each one less hostile and a little more sarcastic. It probably helps that she never causes trouble and makes herself scarce during Gotham’s many wide-spread supervillain issues.

Her record for residing in Gotham unnoticed? Two weeks. In reality, it was probably less, considering that Batman was dealing with Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, and Joker breaking out and wreaking havoc for eight of those days.

She makes it to Gotham. She settles in.

Day one has gone well so far. She’s shopped for the meals that she’ll eat for the next week and she now sits in a coffee shop with a Dan Brown book, enjoying the story and its inaccuracies. Out of habit more than anything else, she glances out the window she sits next to when people pass, and that’s the only reason why she spots the assassin. The assassin is fairly tall and built, as Clint would say, “like a brick shithouse”. He’s clearly in his element and is being extremely casual, but it’s difficult to disguise training—at least, not without more training. She might be alarmed, but…

…the assassin is ordering a chili hot dog with everything on it.

She herself has does stranger things—not even mentioning _Clint_ —but it’s strange enough that she quirks an eyebrow to no one and decides that discretion is the better part of valor. She goes back to her book.

The assassin plants himself against the wall immediately beside her window and seems to unhinge his jaw and swallows half the hotdog. She allows the small grin to grace her face, and the movement seems to catch his eye because he looks directly at her through the window.

“Good hotdog?” she mouths, genuinely amused.

He gives her a thumbs up, mouth full.

By all the gods she’s never believed in, this assassin is sixteen. What the fuck. Who is actually starting training from a young enough age to get a fully-trained assassin at sixteen?

_Batman trains his Robins_ —no, Batman _trains_ his Robins, he does not “whip them into shape” or abuse them if they don’t get a concept quickly enough. This is a fully-developed assassin at the age of sixteen, which means he started at eight or nine. He bears all the similarities that she herself had, years before, when Clint recruited her: perfect peripheral awareness, guarded shows of contentment, a penchant for working until they dropped. The Mistresses would never demand anything less.

Her blood has now boiled. She’s inches within vaporizing.

The assassin beside her window smirks at her and swallows the last of his hotdog with obvious relish. She’s managed to keep her grin during her unpleasant realization, so she laughs a little, waves, and feigns going back to her book.

The assassin leaves, tossing the paper that came with the hotdog in the trash. Natasha pulls out her phone and calls Clint.

“Nat, I thought you were in Gotham? Did Batman catch you this early?”

“No,” she says, struggling to keep her voice steady. “No, I found someone.”

“Is this someone friendly?” Clint asks wearily. He sounds tired, like he’s already resigned to her making friends with the local supervillains.

It’s not her fault that most in their profession are male. She desperately needs some female companionship every once in a while, and at least Pamela keeps her on her toes with her questionable teas.

“Probably not,” she says. “I’m going to try to make them friendly, though.”

There’s a loud clatter that makes her jerk the phone away from her ear and frown. She puts the phone back to her ear. “Clint?”

Clint…Clint is laughing.

“You’re a lot of help,” she says, rolling her eyes.

There’s a high-pitched, wavering whistle noise that takes her a moment to identify as wheezing. Clint is laughing so hard that he’s wheezing.

“There’s–there’s an American saying, Nat,” he chokes out between guffaws. “It goes something like, ‘I hope your kids are just like you’.”

“That sounds like a curse rather than a saying,” she says dryly.

Clint’s laughter goes from quiet, wheezy things to roaring.

Then she realizes what she just said. “Oh, fuck you,” she snaps.

He laughs some more.

She hangs up, thoroughly done with him, however reluctantly amused.

* * *

It’s Day Two of Gotham. So far, she’s evaded Batman’s radar and gained a long-term project. 

On the off chance that the assassin has made a habit of getting loaded hot dogs, Natasha goes back to the coffee shop and sits in the same window. She has, actually, managed to get through most of the book, so she brings the following book in the series.

The assassin has made a habit of getting loaded hot dogs. He reminds her more and more of Clint.

She waves at him through the window in obvious recognition. He waves back.

She takes the opportunity to actually study him for a moment. Most of his movements are devoted to keeping watch and eating, but there’s an underlying tenseness, an uncertain jerkiness that Natasha is having a hard time pinning down the reason for.

And all of a sudden, she understands what Clint saw when he’d flipped her. It’s an undefinable thing in all the languages she knows: something between terror and anger, salt-the-earth kind of vengeance, but it’d be okay if some of the blood poisoning the soil if their own. A boiling resentment, resigned, desperate, full of terror, furious, and–

–and a crushing, insidious, hateful piece of _hope_.

Natasha smiles to herself. Coulson flipped Clint. Clint flipped her. Time to continue the legacy.

Regardless of however much Clint laughed.

She smiles wryly at the assassin. She’s not blind to the parallels, Clint, she’s simply determined.

Natasha, for a moment, _wishes_. She wants the patient guidance of Coulson with her on this journey.

Then she goes back to work.

* * *

Natasha is well familiar with the desperation to live enough to sell anything, which is partly why she’s out at an hour that women in Gotham should definitely not be out at. She takes several thousand in cash with her and she presses three folded hundred-dollar bills into every prostitute’s hand and asks them to go home for the night. Sometimes, they suspect the money’s been tampered with. Sometimes, they don’t want to go home, and she still tells them to keep the money. At one point, she pulled a business man off of a woman who had told him that a condom was required and he’d refused. She’d sent him off with a stiff cuff to the head, a pointy-toed heel to the ass, and an empty wallet. She’d handed the woman the cash and continued on her way.

One of them has a particularly heavy, slightly old-fashioned New Jersey accent. It’s heavy enough that it turns her “er”s into “oi”s. Natasha is dressed to blend, so she gets several incredulous looks. 

“You can’t just give me this much for nothing. How on earth have you not gotten mugged yet?” one of them asks.

She has, actually, gotten mugged twice so far. The muggers are worse for wear, but they’ll live.

“This is where I live, until I get another mission,” she says in reply, handing her a card with her Gotham address and Gotham resident phone number. “You’re welcome to come if you need a warm place. I’m willing to teach self-defense.”

“What is an Avenger doing in Gotham?” one of the women asks suddenly, startled.

“I’m bored,” Natasha says easily. “Gotham is anything but boring.”

The same woman starts laughing, and it sounds vaguely hysterical.

“Honey, this lady bothering you?” says a mechanical voice from behind her.

Natasha turns, unconcerned about being snuck up on. There is a man in a brown leather jacket, armor, and a hideous red helmet. He has enough guns strapped to various places to put the Winter Soldier to shame. The gun in his hand is carefully pointed at the ground, his finger not even on the trigger guard—but the safety’s off, and he’s clearly protective of the women here. No doubt that there’s been new, strange women in the past that show up for a few days, gain the trust of the women, and then kidnap them and secret them away.

“No, Hood, she’s trying to do us a favor at the cost of god-knows-what,” Honey says. However her words sound, she betrays herself and immediately goes to Hood, who wraps the arm not holding the gun around her.

Hood—probably part of a vigilante/superhero alias—visibly turns his helmet to her.

“No cost to me,” she says, indifferent. “I take down human trafficking rings and international terrorists in my spare time, I promise that I’m loaded and that giving hard workers compensation for a night off is not anything that will alarm my bank account.”

Hood’s body language went from defensive to amused but still hostile. The safety clicks on. “I take it that you’re the reason that those thugs I found two streets down are just now waking up and groaning about Chuck Norris?” His grip on Honey slackens, and she visibly relaxes. She moves away from him—also away from Natasha.

She smirks. “Probably.” She turns to the women. “If you trust him, I can leave the money with him and let him test it for contact poison or drugs.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the carefully-concealed start that he did and the immediate ease to a lounge against a wall that was eerily familiar.

Things click. She was sitting down while he stood, so the height difference had to be accounted for, but he matched everything else. The same ticks, same build. She’s never heard him speak, but the twitchiness, the training, the ruthlessness—it speaks of the same thing that she saw in the young assassin that she’d “stalked”–ha, more like “happened upon”–for two days. She’d bet every last dime she had in her bank account that the assassin and Hood were one and same.

_Bozhe moy._

Her assassin was an established vigilante in Gotham, of all places—there was no way that Batman hadn’t already spotted him and either a) hadn’t gotten around to kicking him out of Gotham, b) accepted him in his own Batman-ish way, which was highly unlikely, or c) couldn’t catch him to kick him out of Gotham, which was even unlikelier.

Looks like she has some research to do.

* * *

It’s several hours into Day 3—she never really went to bed; it’s not the first or last time that she’ll pull all-nighters—when she cracks open her laptop and searches **hood gotham, nj**.

The first thing that comes up is a black hoodie with “only in gotham” across the back in bright yellow, but all the following entries are news articles about the Red Hood.

It’s…enlightening.

Looks like option © is actually on the books, and is turning more and more plausible with every article that she clicks on. A duffel bag full of heads delivered to the police station, exploding warehouses, massacres, dismantling drug rings, human trafficking rings, deliveries of all kinds—Red Hood is shaping up to be the kind of Kingpin that Wilson Fisk only wishes he could be.

A very strange Kingpin, who looks out for the children and prostitutes.

_Bring me your weary, your sick and lame_ , she thinks as she goes over the news reports and reads between the lines.

It’s nearing six o’clock when her phone rings. It’s Clint, so she answers. “What?”

“How goes your pet project?” Clint asks, amusement in his voice.

“I’m hanging up on you if you start laughing again,” she says dryly. She knows Clint can hear the amusement in her voice.

There’s a murmur in the background that has the cadence of Tony, but his voice is indistinct. She sighs. “Barton, did you seriously go tattle to Tony?”

“Baby’s first ‘she followed me home’, Nat, I am absolutely tattling on you to everyone I can think of that won’t try to put a stop to it,” Clint says.

She wants to retort that bringing herself in didn’t result in anyone teasing him mercilessly, but Clint’s having fun. She won’t remind him of Coulson’s migraines that had persisted for weeks. “Tell Tony that sleeping and eating is not for the weak,” she says instead.

“Let me know if you want me to break into GCPD to get records!” Tony yells from across the room. His voice is tinny and distorted, but understandable.

“GCPD is so incompetent that their records would be only marginally less useless than the news reports,” Natasha tells him. “Now, if you could hack Batman, I might actually get some work done, but I’ve been told that Oracle is formidable.”

“Who are we looking into?” Tony asks, now right next to the phone.

“His vigilante alias is Red Hood,” she says, paging through Vicky Vale’s bio for her articles on Hood. “I, uh, accidentally realized who he was when I encountered him a few hours ago. He’s my stray that I’m trying to bring in, but I’m becoming convinced that he doesn’t really need to be flipped to the good side, just needs a stabilizing influence.”

“Ho-ho-holy shit,” Tony says.

“Oh, fuck,” Clint says.

“He’s rather impressive,” she agrees. “Gotham breeds them different, that’s for sure.”

“He’s been active for less than a year and he’s got a rap sheet half as long as I do,” Clint says. “And that was just in GCPD, I’m sure Batman has more.”

She nods absently, half-aware that Tony and Clint can’t see her. “I need more information,” she says. “Where he got his training, mostly. Give him another year and he could give me a run for my money, but if I can figure out his background, I can figure out why he’s halfway to unhinged.”

Tony made a noise that she could only classify as a whine, and then ended it in a choke. “What?”

“Which is why I desperately want to know where he came from. I need to know if I’m letting Cap know that I’m taking a year off and dismantling another Red Room,” she agrees grimly. “I wonder if I would get anywhere if I just asked him.”

There is stunned silence on the other end of the line.

“Spit it out,” she says.

“You’re undercover in Gotham, meet the Red Hood under shady circumstances, and then ask him where he gets his training,” Clint says.

“I’m not undercover,” she says, annoyed. “I didn’t even dye my hair. One of the sex workers I visited last night recognized me, and I didn’t lie or evade.”

She waits for a response and gets distracted with shaky video footage of a warehouse. Hood is cutting wide swaths in the thugs—probably Penguin’s–and then he tucks and rolls out the way just in time for the whole structure to let out a concussive BOOM and collapse. Small fires dot the area.

Hood hauls himself up onto another building, sways a moment, and tips his head back in what is probably a laugh before bounding away across rooftops.

“I think I’ve misunderstood your Gotham trips for a while,” Clint finally says, bringing her back to the conversation that she’s supposed to be having.

“What did you think I was doing?” she asks.

“Checking out if there were any heroes going batshit,” Clint says.

“Oh,” she says, distracted. “No. I go to Gotham because Batman doesn’t like other heroes in his city, and I like to see how fast he can catch me.”

There’s a weighted silence on the other end of the line. “So the couple days in Gotham and leaving?”

“I normally get caught around day four,” she says easily. “I made it to two weeks, once, but he was distracted with Joker and Scarecrow.”

“You can count on another long stay in Gotham,” Tony says suddenly. “Batman is going crazy over Red Hood. He won’t be keeping watch for heroes on the DL for a while.”

“Lovely,” she says, ticking the information over in her head. “He has some strange values of morality.”

“Who, Hood?” Clint asks, startled.

“No, Batman,” she says. “Hood is standard for assassins like us.”

“The League of Assassins,” Tony says. “Well, that’s refreshingly direct. That’s probably where your stray came from, at least in training. Apparently, he uses a lot of the same moves as the assassins that Batman has tangled with before. Not completely the same, but similar enough that he definitely has ties.”

Natasha purses her lips as she mulls over the information. This is painting a picture that she’s not sure she likes the look of.

“Hey, Nat,” Clint says gently. “Get info out of the guy, and we’ll have your back every step of the way.”

She breathes deliberately. “Information, then go on a warpath.” She stops. Considers. Her next words are hard to get out, but it’s been years since the Red Room. She can voice her wants. It’s Clint and Tony, both kings of having unreasonable wants. “I don’t want you anywhere near this, physically.”

“I will try to stay out of it until everything goes ass over teakettle,” Clint says.

She snorts and hangs up.

* * *

Natasha heads back to the coffee shop and sits in her usual place. The assassin—Red Hood—appears right on time for his usual loaded hot dog. Instead of propping himself next to the window like he has the last two times, he makes his way into the coffee shop.

“Mind if I sit here?” he says. He’s got a grin on his face like he’s going to try to flirt.

“Hi!” she chirps in recognition and waves at the chair in invitation, a friendly smile on her face. “How were the girls last night after I left?” It’s a blatant reference to the working women they’d both seen last night if he was who she thought he was, but was subtle enough that eavesdroppers wouldn’t know immediately—and, on the off chance that she was wrong, he’d just be confused and think she’d mistaken him for someone else.

His bordering-on-flirtatious grin drops off his face like Natasha had flipped a switch. “What do you want?” he asks. His voice doesn’t quite break Batman’s record for strained gravel, but she could tell that he’d smoked at one point or another.

She keeps her friendly smile, even if it gains an edge of victory. It’s nice to put suspicions to rest. “Very little,” she says. “I have a particular vendetta against child-assassin-making organizations. I want to know who trained you, and determine for myself if I need to spend a year or two dismantling them in the messiest, most visible way possible.”

His expression becomes…interesting. There’s surprise, definitely, and maybe some vindictive amusement. Confusion is pretty prominent, too, but the majority of his expression is something that Natasha’s not familiar with. He’s caught completely off guard.

Suddenly, his previous expression gets wiped off and his entire bearing becomes calculating.

“You’re the Black Widow. Why do you need me to tell you?” he asks shrewdly.

“I don’t,” she says easily. “I already had Tony hack Batman’s files on you and came up with the League of Shadows.”

His eyes do something strange when she mentions Batman. A bright turquoise is an odd color for eyes in the first place, so she definitely notices when his eyes suddenly turn as green as her own. He breathes in a moment. It’s incredibly subtle, and if she wasn’t who she was, she never would have noticed. Hood blinks and his eyes turn to a light blue-green: greener than when they started, but not anything like they were a moment ago.

Something cold clasps around her heart, vividly remembering Clint and his electric blue eyes. Her instinct says to immediately knock him out and do a hard reset, but this might be an entirely different version of mind control and she might make it worse. 

She forcibly yanks herself away from pondering it any longer. Information, then warpath.

“I wanted confirmation from you, and to give you a heads up,” she says.

“A…heads up,” he says flatly.

She sips her coffee. “Sure. I’ll be tracking your steps back to the League of Shadows, and I currently don’t have much of an idea of what I’ll be stepping on. I figure that if I walk into a hornets’ nest, then that’s on me, but if they come after you without any warning, that’s still on me. The plan is to attract enough attention that no one would even think about coming after you–I know, you’re a highly efficient Kingpin who don’t need no assassin watching out for you–but in the event that the unlikely happens, as it is wont to do, you’re prepared.”

He looks like she struck him over the head with a baseball bat. It’s a little amusing, she won’t lie, but she persistently pushes down the little laugh that wants to come up. She sips her coffee again, resists the urge to slurp it obnoxiously, and waits.

“I’m not a Kingpin,” he finally says.

Which. What?

She allows the grin on her face, setting the expression to highly amused while being absolutely deadpan. “A very efficient Kingpin,” she disagrees.

Natasha will be calling Clint tonight, and Clint will actually hurt himself laughing at this. She’s accused people of being Kingpins before, but hardly ever to their face, and she’s never gotten quite the reaction that she’s getting from Hood.

Actually, there was that one Russian mafiya head that had looked especially flattered to get personally taken out by _Chernaya Vodva._ He’d been a bit odd, though. 

“Uh, no, Kingpins control the trade and the distribution of illegal goods, I’m–”

Natasha has the pleasure of watching Hood try to come up with a description that doesn’t involve some variation of “controlling the trade and the distribution of illegal goods”. This is genuine comedy. The disturbingly efficient teen _has_ seized control of the entirety of the trade and distribution of illegal goods in Crime Alley and the Narrows through systematic removal of power centers and redirected the power to easily controllable figureheads.

If Natasha hadn’t already done her research, she’d suspect that the assassin is Russian. The Russians like those kind of power plays. Of course, so do the British and the Americans. It’s practically a time-honored tradition of powerful coalitions, and the fact that this not-even-fully-grown teen has stepped into these shoes deserves genuine admiration.

At least, in Natasha’s books. 

And, even better, the assassin has become a Kingpin in an effort to make it so that crime damages the innocent _less_. There’s no more human traffickers, no more abusive pimps, the homeless and beaten down children of Gotham are kept as safe as Gotham can be, the drugs are checked for poisonous additives, and the guns that are imported are checked for safety features and flaws that would result in a deadly accident. Of course, there are other, more esoteric items on the black market that Hood probably doesn’t have control over, but he’s covered the main things that cause deaths in Crime Alley.

Natasha is aware of her superhero status, even if it never quite feels real after being a ghost draped in blood for so long, and she’s met vigilante and hero and villain alike. Hood is the definition of an anti-hero, and watching his work unfold through the articles and shaky phone videos and the crime statistics dropping steadily has been like watching a time-lapse of an artist working.

Sure, _Batman_ might have some issues with the amount of murder the assassin has tossed around, but now that the power centers are out of play and the rules established, Natasha has the suspicion that Hood’s tendencies for massacres with a side of theatrical flair will decrease dramatically.

“Fuck, I am a Kingpin,” Hood mumbles to himself after a long moment of silence.

Natasha sips her coffee noncommittally.

“You’re laughing at me,” he says, resigned.

“A little bit, yes,” Natasha says. “I don’t normally have to inform someone of their Kingpin status, much less argue with them over it.”

He’s silent for a long while. She can see him struggling with something, and she gives him the space and time to do it. She has plenty of coffee to sip from.

He’s eyeing her like he’s trying to figure out how trustworthy she is, warring between the fact that she’s obviously not here to stop him from being the Red Hood and the fact that she’s the Black Widow–famous for taking down international terrorist organizations, reigning Kingpins, and invading aliens alike.

“You’re right,” he says. “I was trained by the League of Shadows, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that they’re child-assassin-makers. I think I was still fifteen when I first got there, and…well, I grew up here,” he says, waving at the window out the coffee shop. “Not many people would call me a child at fifteen after I’d spent three years on the streets in Crime Alley.”

…he was fifteen when he _got_ there? She must be dealing with an enhanced, because normally, Natasha’s assessment of age is fairly on-point. She hadn’t actually thought that he was enhanced until just now, when the timeline that he just hinted at didn’t nearly match up with her estimate of his age. How old was he actually? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Older?

“And how old are you now?” she asks.

He gives her an unimpressed look.

She holds up her hands in the universal signal that she’s not going to harm him. “Don’t give me that look, I thought you were sixteen when I first saw you. Forgive me for being curious, it’s literally in my job description. I take it that you’ll bite my head off if I ask you what kind of enhancement you have?”

“I’m not enhanced,” he answers curtly.

She arches an eyebrow skeptically. “Really? Nothing from birth? Not exposed to any particularly radioactive chemicals or irradiated bugs? Hit with something magical? Tortured into activating whatever dormant gene that results in odd side-effects such as a healing factor and slowed aging?”

“This is Gotham,” he says dryly. His face says exasperated, but his body language says _highly concerned_.

Natasha wants to press–there’s clearly _something_ specific that he’s thinking about, and it’s normally her job to get answers–but takes a steadying sip of her coffee instead.

Hood is starting to look angry. Or no, closer to disturbed. She’s not quite sure why–possibly because she caught him off guard.

“Mm, fair,” she says after she swallows her coffee. “My New Yorker friends regularly denounce New Jersey as a whole as a general shithole. I’ll be here until Batman kicks me out again, and then I’ll be going after the League.”

His expression does some interesting contortions, and he abruptly stands, taking a bite of his mostly-uneaten hotdog. He chews a moment, and then says, quietly, “ _Fuck_ , fine. If you go after the League, just know that their leader is someone by the name of Ra’s al Ghul, who’s an unmitigated, immortal, pervy asshole who would just as soon as kill you as _allow_ you to become his plaything.”

“Oh, lovely,” she says cheerily. “I love ripping those kinds of people to shreds.”

The look he sends her way says that he thinks that she’s a few screws short of a Dum-E, but that’s okay. He probably doesn’t realize that he’d been sitting across from another immortal assassin.

Then he leaves.

Natasha sips her coffee and contemplates the cover of her book. It honestly deserves more of her attention–Dan Brown is a wonderful author–but she’s distracted. Thinking.

There are several options that could be true, and getting a straight answer out of Hood in a semi-friendly manner would be nigh-on impossible at this point. She knows several things:

  1. Hood went to the League of Assassins at fifteen
  2. Hood is possibly enhanced
  3. Hood is older than sixteen
  4. Hood lived on the streets for three years in Gotham



And…that’s it. Well, she’s worked with worse information caches.

She traces the embossed cover while she thinks. Oh.

5\. Hood is possibly brainwashed

She remembers that sudden, startling green that flashed for a moment and then never fully left throughout the conversation.

Option 1: Hood is as old as she thinks he is: early to mid-twenties. He was trained for eight to ten years and then left for unknown reasons about a year ago. Not devastating. Not great, but not the worst thing to ever happen to a child on the streets.

Option 2: Hood is younger than she thinks he is, and was with the League for three to five years. He was brainwashed, trained constantly, had memories driven into his skull and muscle memory drilled into his bones at a brutal pace. Probably left when he broke the brainwashing, and is in Gotham…to come home? To deal with matters here? She’s not quite sure.

Option 3: Hood is younger than she thinks he is, and was with the League for three to five years. He trained at a normal pace and built off of muscle memory from when he was younger.

Option 3 is the most troubling. Hood got picked up off the streets to become an assassin…and he already had training? From where? Street fighting, while effective to a certain degree, certainly doesn’t lay down the base for assassin training.

Suddenly, she grins to herself. Clever, _clever_ Hood. He let her assume that he’d been picked up off the streets, but he might have had a home–or at least, a roof over his head–when he’d gotten picked up. Someone with any amount of money to spare in Gotham gets self defense lessons. Depending on how long he’d been off the streets, he may well have been in self defense lessons for years. Street fighting _is_ a good base for MMA: quick, think on your feet, balance, and use your surroundings to your advantage. MMA for a few years would definitely allow the League of Shadows to take his training and turn him into an assassin in a few short years, even without a brutal pace.

If she wanted to pare it down further, she’d have to ask questions–questions that she is certainly not getting answered any time soon. If he had already started his training, was it voluntary? Is there a secondary organization that she’d have to hunt down? Was this MMA, taught by a certified instructor, or beaten into him?

She doesn’t know, and she can’t ask him. He’s understandably paranoid about his secret identity, and she’s willing to let it go. Not all heroes are comfortable with other heroes knowing their secret identity. Natasha’s just fine with that. 

She wants to help the child, not scare him off. No, she doesn’t care that he’s possibly as old as twenty-four–she’s still going to call him a child. He’s uncertain, possibly brainwashed, probably abused, and struggling with major changes within and without. Natasha was well over seventy years old when Clint found her, and Natasha of today definitely considers the Natasha then a child.

Guidelines and affection are what children need. Defection Day Natasha had needed a lot of guidelines and affection.

Hood needs guidelines and affection.

Natasha was not prepared to ever become a mom, much less of a (legally) grown man, but she’s been told that she’s fantastic at doing at whatever she sets her mind to. Mostly, that’s killing, and wrangling information out of recalcitrant, tight-lipped people.

She thinks that she could add parenting to the list with some work.

…Clint is going to die laughing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 3 in Gotham takes for _ever_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love you all. You are all amazing. <3

Natasha eventually leaves the coffee shop—after finishing her coffee and getting another to-go. Gotham knows how to do caffeine without making it sludge, unlike certain others that she could name. 

She is back in her room, putzing in the kitchenette, with the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder. She’s waiting for Clint to pick up. 

“Nat!” he exclaims loudly into the phone immediately after he picks up. 

Natasha almost lets the phone slip out of her precarious cradle of it. “Hi,” she says simply. 

“So how did it gooooo?” he asks, sounding like a mocking imitation of a teenage girl asking another teenage girl for the details of a date. 

“The League of Assassins has another name by the League of Shadows,” she says casually. “He’s not sixteen, he’s anywhere from seventeen to early twenties, probably enhanced and unfortunately only got the memo when I mentioned it--” 

“Ouch,” Clint says, sounding sympathetic. 

“Yes,” she agrees. “He was apparently with the League since he was fifteen until about a year ago.” 

She waits. 

“That...” he starts, and trails off. “That doesn’t make any sense.” 

“Nope,” she agrees. 

“Is he brainwashed?” Clint asks carefully. 

Her lips purse as she chops the chives. “Possibly,” she admits. “He shows similar signs to you when you were under Loki’s spell. Not always. I was reluctant to act on it since it obviously wasn’t the same exact thing.” 

“You were afraid that you’d make it worse if he was fighting it, or if it was wearing off,” Clint says, understanding. “So are we going with the brainwashing theory, or the question of previous trainers theory?” 

See? This is why she likes Clint. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “And I’m not going to push. I’m going to build my rapport with him until I get booted, and then I’m going after the League. Even if they don’t normally do child soldiers, I want whatever information that can give me on him. If I can get an idea on what he came to them with, I can decide if I’m leveling them or not, immortal asshole or no.” 

“ _What_ \--” Clint shrieks. 

Natasha continues on to chop her potatoes and dumps them into the pot of boiling water. She listens, unflinchingly this time, as the phone is wrestled away from Clint. She can still hear him screeching. _Diva_ , she thinks fondly. 

“Hi, Natasha,” a new voice says. 

“Steve!” she says, pleasantly surprised. 

She can hear Clint in the background. His yelling is muffled, like he’s trying to go for the phone and Steve has just grabbed ahold of his face to keep Clint from yanking the phone back. The mental image is amusing. 

“I heard something about salting the earth and immortal assholes, was wondering if you wanted help,” Steve says easily. Clint’s yelling has grown in pitch—and...by all the unholy things, apparently he can communicate well enough that Tony is now yelling, too. 

“No, I should be just fine,” she says, electing to ignore the background yelling. “Depending on how things go, I may be calling to tell you that I’ll be taking a year off to be doing the previously-mentioned salting the earth, but I’m hoping that it doesn’t go that far.” 

“Let me know where you’ll be planning to strike. Depending on where—I'm sorry, Natasha, gimme a second?” he asks. 

Natasha doesn’t even get to say anything—not that she would have—before the phone’s receiver is obviously covered and Steve _bellows_ at Tony and Clint. She catches snatches of Steve’s uncharacteristically top-volume lecture: “perfectly capable woman”, “doesn’t need the excessive pizzaz”, “extending the offer of assistance”, “delicate operations, not the half-baked super-nuisances we get here”, and, for the coup-de-grace, “already accomplished at watering their crops with their own blood, supposedly immortal or not”. 

Natasha, for her part, is laughing loudly by the end of it. 

Steve quiets enough after his lecture that she can’t understand him through his covering of the receiver, but she still catches the sounds of Tony and Clint protesting. 

Toddlers. She works with toddlers. She likes her co-workers, but they are definitely toddlers some days. 

Steve uncovers the receiver and puts the phone back to his ear to be met with the sound of Natasha’s dying chuckles. “What?” he asks defensively. 

“’Half-baked super-nuisances',” she quotes, delighted, launching back into laughter all over again. 

“Shush,” he says, obviously pouting a little. “Depending on where you’d like to strike, there are a few missions that we have in various areas. We could take the Quinjet, the rest of us go off to our mission, and you can go evoke terror in the hearts of...what was it? Immortal assholes?” 

“No, just the one,” she says, grinning lightly. “In the hearts of a bunch of stone-cold assassins is probably a better phrase.” 

“Oh, of course,” Steve agrees. “Give us a ring if you want backup, you know we’re perpetually raring to go.” 

Oh, does she ever. 

There’s a crackle and a loud _CLANK_ , and then she’s talking to Tony. Or rather, Tony is talking _at_ her. She guesses his face isn’t actually facing the phone, accustomed to speaking to JARVIS, and she’s not quite sure what he’s talking about. 

“Tony,” she says after a minute or so of being completely lost. “Tony, back up, give me context.” She pauses, and then adds, “And face the phone, I only got about a third of what you were saying.” 

There’s a pause, weighted with how Tony is re-orienting both his body and replaying the conversation—or soliloquy, really. 

“Who’s the immortal asshole?” he asks, and she gets the feeling that that is _not_ what he was talking about before. 

“He goes by the name of Ra’s al Ghul—R-A-apostrophe-S, lowercase A-L, then capital G-H-U-L,” she says, letting the potatoes boil and grabbing the flour she’d set aside on the counter and the yogurt and eggs out of the fridge. “He’s apparently immortal—Hood didn’t tell me how or why—and he’s also, evidently, pervy and borderline sociopathic, which is just what everyone wants in their terrorist organization.” 

She’s on speaker. She can tell because she can hear Clint snort and Steve let out a noise that is probably a mostly-strangled laugh. 

“I did some digging,” she says. She leaves out the part that she’s made acquaintances with the street workers, who are wary of her, but apparently all know that she’s gotten a mostly-all-clear from Red Hood. New Yorkers’ gossip mill is only trumped by the Gothamites’. “The League is mostly based out of the Middle East, but Batman pissed them off however many years ago and have made regular forays into the city since then--just to stir up trouble.” There’s a produce vendor that got really snippy and went on a three-minute rant about how he’s supposed to make money when he’s got Batman and the League playing real-life Fruit Ninja that Natasha had to actually use her training to keep a sympathetic face on and not bust a gust laughing at. 

There is also the accompanying YouTube video that she’d pulled up out of curiosity and got the magnificent image of weapons-grade steel forged with loving precision into a tool of clean death being used to slice an actual watermelon that had been chucked at the assassin by one of the Robins. The video is too grainy to get a pin on which Robin, but she would bet just about anything that it was the second Robin. The second Robin enjoyed pulling weird shit out of nowhere and throwing whatever-it-was at unsuspecting enemies before launching himself. 

The three-pronged attack—with Batman as the formidable third prong—worked about ninety-five percent of the time, and Natasha almost always gets a laugh out of whatever had been used as a distraction this time. 

“Half-baked assassinating nuisances, in other words,” Tony snarked. 

It’s not a video call, but Natasha can _see_ Steve’s eye-roll. 

“In other news, I had to beat Hood over the head with the knowledge that he is a Kingpin,” she says casually, grinning outright in the privacy of her apartment. 

Clint immediately bursts into laughter, while silence radiates from Steve and Tony. 

“He tried arguing with me,” she continues, her grin leaking into her voice. “He defined a Kingpin, and then tried to define himself as something else. I _watched_ him mentally flip through various adjectives and come up with synonyms to the definition he’d just read me about Kingpins.” 

There’s a muted _thud_ , and Tony finally joins Clint in laughter. Steve’s not one for boisterous laughter like the rest of the boys, but she can imagine him resting his head against the nearest flat surface and grinning helplessly at the _very idea_ of having to be told that you’re a kingpin. 

“’You’re a wizard, Harry,’” Tony chokes out, and then resumes laughing. 

Clint wheezes a little. 

“Very much so,” she agrees. “He’s stupidly impressive in his criminal activities, so I did not anticipate having to argue with him about the definition of them. It’s one thing if I have to argue with someone over whether viewing a copyrighted video posted online somewhere that’s not sanctioned by the company is illegal. Its an entirely different thing if I have to argue with someone over whether their systematic takeover of power of the various mafias defines them as a Kingpin.” 

Natasha folds the yogurt, flour, and eggs together to make the dough needed as she talks. 

“Natasha,” Steve says. His grin is bright in his voice. “You’re breaking Clint.” 

Yes, she is quite capable of hearing Clint wheeze. 

“I need both hands for my perogies now, so I’m hanging up and giving Clint a chance to catch his breath,” Natasha says. 

Tony shouts something to JARVIS—something mathematical that she hasn’t bothered looking up yet—and Steve says, “Clint’s flapping a hand in the phone’s direction, so I’m assuming that he’s saying goodbye.” 

“Bye, Clint,” she says affectionately. 

“Bye, Natasha,” Steve says. 

“Bye Steve, go wrestle Tony into eating something not blended by a robot with questionable tastes and sleeping sometime before I come back to the Tower,” she says, and hangs up before she can hear Tony whine about how four hours of sleep over three days is perfectly reasonable. 

* * *

She realizes something as soon as she starts trying to dig into Ra’s al Ghul’s past: Hood was not lying or exaggerating about the _immortal_ part of the _immortal asshole_ description. She can’t decide if she’s disgusted or impressed by the fact that he’s anywhere from two hundred to seven hundred years old, depending on what trail she follows. His actual name has long been lost to the annals of history, much like her own—though whether it was on purpose or by accident would only be known by Ra’s. His new name directly translates to _Head of the Demon_ , or, more American- ized , _Demon’s Head_. 

On the plus side, the word _ghul_ —demon—has been around for many more hundreds of years before Ra’s has, so she doesn’t have to wonder if he named himself after it or if they named it after him. 

On the other hand, the only _Demon’s Head_ that comes up during cursory google searches is some punk clubs and the occasional BDSM place. Ra’s al Ghul, as a name of a person, shows up nowhere. There is a lady named Talia al Ghul that flits in and out of Gotham elite as she ferries back and forth between her home in the Middle East and Gotham, but she’s so high profile that her secretly being part of a terrorist organization is a stretch. 

Natasha has done it. She still works undercover and she is still highly successful. It’s possible. With whatever immortality source (or possibly a gene?) that Ra’s al Ghul has, he could have theoretically passed it onto his daughter, and therefore Talia is much older than she looks. Natasha’s first instinct says that she’s spinning this yarn for far too long and it’s implausible in the extreme, but. Well. She passed her own centennial three years ago, and she still looks twenty-six. And she lives with a frozen super-soldier from 1945, who is rapidly nearing his own centennial and looks twenty-three. Plus—well. Talia al Ghul has ties with Gotham, and anyone that she would even think twice about and has ties with Gotham is probably worthy of some digging. Gotham was highly suspect long before Batman and the various Rogues showed up on the scene. 

She’s beginning to suspect that she’ll get nothing from google, and only vicious, overblown rumors from the locals when she starts heading towards the most likely area where the League of Shadows is. 

But Talia. Talia might be the key. 

She digs a little deeper, using her old SHIELD access paths at times (slightly illegal) and outright hacking other things (blatantly illegal) and manages to access TSA and FAA for the last few years. Talia has travelled a lot more than the tabloids have tracked—all of the countries on the Arabian Peninsula, which makes sense. Some other Middle East countries—Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—as well as Russia, Poland, Switzerland, Egypt, Somalia, Libya, and Morocco. 

The interesting thing? 

The only time Talia travels alone is when she goes to the States. All other times, she is accompanied by people that are clearly bodyguards, or one other male that fits the description of Hood, or a child. 

Her phone pings and lights up next to her. She unlocks it swiftly. 

**ras** **al** **ghul** **has a daughter** **_,_ **Tony texts. 

**let me guess, her name is Talia?** Natasha sends back. 

**her names** **talia** **al** **ghul** **and is somehow high society socialite? how does that work?**

**Carefully.** Natasha responds snarkily. 

**wait what did YOU find on her?**

**likely the location of los and a few pieces of confirmation that hood was probably under her care for several years, but not in the last year. it fits the information** **i** **was given. hood is probably about nineteen or twenty**

It’s a grim thought, but it looks like the League of Shadows are not completely to blame for Hood’s proficiency. This will be a long mission. Dismantling the child soldier/assassin organizations tend to take a while. 

* * *

Natasha had strayed from the path laid out for her in late November of 1989. In a blatant display of correlation does not equal causation, it was also the last time she had seen Drakov—aka the Winter Soldier, aka “Bucky” Barnes. Their last time together was a traumatic one, and ended with Drakov being forcibly wiped and Natasha extracted and sent across the world. 

Perhaps an outside observer would immediately jump to the Hollywood-esque conclusion: she was so distraught over what happened to him that she broke away to do good in the world. On the contrary—it was not his treatment that had bothered her. Being wiped was normal for Drakov. He became unstable rapidly, unable to do his job. 

No, what had bothered her was he, himself, who named her Romanova. 

“You hold the power of the states in your hand,” he’d said affectionately. “A queen among women, always.” 

She was number twenty-eight among the Red Room. Her name was whatever her handlers wanted it to be for the mission. 

A name. A name. A name. Strange how powerful something so simple as a name can be. 

And then she had gone looking. For her name. For her sisters’ names. For the names of those that she had slaughtered and killed while training to become _Chernaya_ _Vodva_ _._

By 1991, the Soviet Union fell at her feet, and the Americans started realizing that there were some outside influences on how it had fallen. 

By 1998, she’d been safely ensconced in SHIELD, under the protection of Coulson and the wing of Barton. 

Twenty-five years had passed, and the shock of seeing Drakov in Gotham was like Clint managing to rig one of his pranks successfully. Shocking at first, and hilarious after a few seconds had passed. 

Of all the places that Drakov could have gone to. He had all of New York City, all of the US, all of the world that he could have gone to, and he chose _Gotham_. Its the late hours of her third day in Gotham, and she gets hit over the head with the (hopefully) metaphorical stick of Nostalgia. 

“Natalia,” he says. 

“Drakov,” she says. 

He looks...surprisingly good, actually, for a man set free of his captors and little idea of the state of the world. If he’s who Steve says he is—which he probably is—then Natasha has little doubt that the combination of Steve Rogers Wrangler and Winter Soldier both served him in good stead in this brave new world. 

“You look good,” she offers. 

“You look like trouble,” he responds dryly. 

She can’t help the smirk. “My specialty,” she says. 

“Are you and Steve still running headfirst into the stupidest shit?” he asks. 

“Even worse: we _plan_ on running headfirst into the stupidest shit,” she says. 

“Oh, no, not the plan,” he says flatly. 

She grins, sidles up to him, links their arms together. “I have missed you,” she says fondly. “And more to the point, so has Steve. How dare you not teach me how to withstand his particular brand of puppy dog eyes.” 

They walk, falling into step like they had so many times before. “You overestimate my teaching abilities if you think that I can teach you that through anything but throwing you at it repeatedly.” 

Remembering the times that he had _actually_ thrown her at something, she sighs. “ _Bozhe_ _moy_. No. That is not an effective teaching strategy, Drakov.” 

“Maybe not, but it’s highly entertaining anyways,” he says. 

She’s been waiting in the area to see if Hood would show, but with the figure at her side, she assumes that Hood would sooner turn himself over to Batman than reveal himself to _Zimny Soldat_. With that assumption, she meanders away from Hood’s usual route through the Narrows and back to a small diner that had probably been there since Drakov had been born. 

They order in the quiet of the diner, the lone cashier and cook their only company. It was definitely Gotham, Natasha mused, because the teenager did an up-and-down of both of them, clocked half their weapons, the quiet banter, the easy stances, and decided they weren’t here to bust the place up and promptly lost interest. 

She loves Gotham. She hates Gotham. She could live in Gotham and never decide which to settle on. 

Drakov hands the girl a hundred, watches her verify it, and tells her to keep the change, don’t worry about it. 

They sit in the back of the diner with their backs to the wall. Natasha wraps her hands around her lemonade like its wintertime and the drink is hot chocolate. Drakov breaks the comfortable silence with, “So why the hell are you in Gotham, of all places?” 

Natasha side-eyes him dryly. “You’re one to talk.” 

The cashier flips a burger and snorts. 

Natasha decides that she actually doesn’t care about keeping Drakov a secret. “Last I heard, you’d disappeared after giving Steve a beating he probably deserved for his uncanny ability to down every flying object he’s in. And before that, you were being forcibly wiped after you tried to be romantic, wound up being treasonously romantic, and inadvertently set me on a one-woman mission to take out Soviet Russia. And then, with a best friend in New York, Hydra bases literally everywhere but here, do-good missions all over the world, and a person that is only a step removed from you and actually has his head screwed on straight in DC...you’re here.” 

“Oh my _god_ I’m not supposed to be listening to this,” the cashier yelps and flees to the back room. 

“I literally could not care less if you decided to call the cops,” Drakov calls after her, an amused smile writ across his face. 

“Lookit you, using modern lingo,” she says, approval in her voice. 

“You’re right, there’s no Hydra here,” he says. “This was a...stopover, I guess.” 

She arches an eyebrow. “A stopover.” 

“Well, I’m told I have this person in New York who likes downing every flying object he’s ever been on, and this is on the way from DC.” 

She resists the urge to point out the obvious and call him a smartass, instead saying, “It’s been almost a year. It does not take a year to get from DC to New York, even if you walked it.” 

“I took the scenic route.” 

Natasha despairs. She’s never letting him and Clint meet. She’d never get them to shut up. They’d snark at each other and never, ever let anyone get a word in edgewise. 

There’s a strange noise from the counter. The cashier, having realized that she can’t just hope the meal magically fixes itself, is standing in the doorway to the back room, eyes wide as she stares at Drakov. Natasha can’t tell if the look on her face was _oh no, he’s hot with a sense of humor_ or _oh no, he’ll kill me if I laugh_. 

The poor girl opens her mouth and then shuts it with, “Its not your business, Dawn, do not ask questions that you should not know the answers to.” 

Drakov and Natasha both watch her for a moment. She’s highly entertaining, and not nearly as cowed as the average person would be when confronted with the two hundred pounds of lethal muscle and a resting bitch face. 

“Why do I always get the snarky snipers adopting me?” Natasha asks herself. “I’m never letting you meet Clint.” 

“Doesn’t Clint work with you and Steve _frequently_?” Drakov asks skeptically. 

“I’m never letting you meet Clint,” Natasha repeats without elaborating. It’s not at all true, of course. Clint would be the perfect mediator between Drakov and Steve in the beginning, having a) experience at bringing someone in from the cold, b) first-hand experience with brainwashing, and c) enough general irreverence that he’ll either have one of them trying to kill him or make someone cry. 

Natasha doesn’t know Bucky Barnes. She knows Drakov, and she knows _Soldat_ . Steve knows Bucky Barnes. How much of Bucky Barnes is left in Drakov or _Soldat_ is unknown. 

“And what are _you_ doing in Gotham?” Drakov asks instead of continuing to badger her about Clint. 

“Batman and I are playing hide-and-seek,” she says, straight-faced. 

Natasha takes immense pleasure out of the flat look that Drakov gives her. “Batman. Is playing hide-and-seek.” 

“Well he plays a more destructive version all the time with the Rogues, its nice to do the same thing without having to worry about someone targeting civilians,” Natasha says, just to wind him up. 

Drakov plants an elbow on the table and his face into his palm. He sighs. “You’re not hiding.” 

“I’m not broadcasting that I’m here, either,” she says. 

“That’s not hiding,” he says. 

On the contrary: the amount of work it takes to get into Gotham unnoticed by Batman’s security on the edges of the island is immense. She had to disguise herself as a particularly brave (or crazy) EMT from a neighboring city coming to help during the previous Rogue attack in order to get into the city. The facial recognition scanners don’t work quite as well with the mask on, and it’s not like anyone is going to ask her to take the mask _off_ as an EMT. From there, she had to use a long-established identity that she’s yet to use in Gotham that wasn’t on SHIELD records to get herself an apartment to stay in. Staying in Gotham and wandering around the city isn’t the hard part—it's the getting in. She uses Stark-verified shielded electronics that have a spy-version of incognito windows to do research and enough safehouses around the world to establish her own VPN in the event that she has to do some less-than-legal electronical B-and-E. She just has to be careful to use the laptop enough for things that she doesn’t mind being tracked. 

She’d spent nine months after dumping all of SHIELD secrets on the internet coordinating with Tony and Clint to prioritize and rescue as many deep-cover agents as possible. She’d used every bit of skill, every one of SHIELD’s and Tony’s gadgets to tip the balance in her favor. Here? She’s hiding in plain sight. She doesn’t need the wigs and facial screen coverings and clothing changes; nobody’s life is on the line. It’s _Batman_ , some city-wide games of hide-and-seek between heroes is good for them, right? 

“It’s all the secrecy I need,” she says simply. 

There was a wealth of words left unsaid, but Drakov merely nods. 

Their eyes are drawn to the windows as someone in a leather jacket passes them and then opens the diner door with a cheerful bell. In the second before Natasha realizes who it is, Dawn smiles and cheerfully exclaims, “Hood! Right on time!” 

Hood takes off his helmet, surprising the hell out of her—and then she sees that he has a domino mask on and can’t help but say, “You’re a theatre kid, aren’t you?” 

Hood grins at her, surprisingly bright and easy. “Guilty as charged, Mz. Widow.” 

Natasha nods approvingly at Dawn when she realizes how much the girl has relaxed in Hood’s presence. She does, in fact, have a self-preservation instinct that Natasha was wondering if it existed. 

Hood hands her another hundred-dollar bill, just like Drakov had done fifteen minutes before, but Dawn protests this time. Natasha and Drakov say absolutely nothing to each other but manage to mutually decide that they are watching the show. Vigilante and cashier face off with their faces screwed up at each other, one protesting against taking money, the other protesting that they absolutely deserve it for the food, until the absolutely pathetic fight devolves even further into a literal staring contest where nothing was getting done. 

Natasha gives into her baser impulses and obnoxiously slurps the last of her lemonade as loudly as she can in the silence. Drakov elbows her roughly. 

Cashier and vigilante both snap their heads to them. 

“No, no, don’t mind us,” Drakov assured them, an amused tilt to his eyes. 

“Please, continue,” Natasha says. 

Hood took the distraction as permission to stuff the hundred in the tip jar and then hold up empty hands when Dawn glared at him. 

Drakov let out an undignified snort. 

“Hood! Quit tormenting the cashier and let me introduce you to a very good friend of mine,” Natasha says, rolling her eyes. 

“I know your order,” Dawn says, shooing him. 

Natasha scoots farther over on the booth bench and pats the seat next to her, offering the sightlines to him. He slides into the seat warily, setting the helmet down on the chair opposite him. 

“Red Hood, this is one of my old trainers, Drakov, who’s better known as the Winter Soldier,” and she absolutely doesn’t twitch when Hood immediately has his guns out, “Drakov, this is Red Hood, who’s a child assassin and a _highly_ efficient Kingpin. I’m planning on razing his trainers to the ground as soon as I get done with my hide-and-seek with Batman.” 

Drakov also doesn’t twitch when Hood draws his guns, only inclines his head in greeting. 

Hood looks like he hates the situation and doesn’t know where to start unpacking her introduction. 

“Deep breath, Hood, he’s a lot more stable than he was a year ago,” Natasha says. She understands the urge, especially after being sprung with this kind of information. 

“That’s not a brain trauma that you can heal from,” he bites out. “Forgive me if I don’t exactly trust the brain-damaged, brain-washed, walking tank.” 

“He’s got a point, Natenshka,” Drakov murmurs. 

“There’s only one person here that probably hasn’t been brainwashed as some point in their life, and she’s behind the counter,” Natasha said. “I went from murdering heads of state to being a goddamn superhero that little girls look up to; second chances are most _definitely_ something that we believe in.” 

Hood’s eyes aren’t visible behind the domino. The white film is effective and slightly unsettling. She desperately needs to see what color his eyes are. 

“Hood?” she checks in after a minute has passed and he hasn’t moved. 

“You wouldn’t bring someone into the city that would be a Rogue if they started here,” Hood says, sounding like he was trying to believe it. 

“Buddy, if I started here, I wouldn’t have been captured by Hydra in the first place,” Drakov says dryly. “There’s the Hooverville that I lived in for a while, and then there’s this shithole filled with new and fucking disturbing things.” 

There’s a cadence that she’s not heard before in Drakov’s voice, and is suddenly slapped with the realization that the heavy Brooklyn and dry sarcasm is probably nothing but Bucky Barnes shining through seventy years of torture and conditioning. 

She turns—carefully, slowly, to not spook Hood—and looks at Drakov to mark the changes. His shoulders are set easier. He seems to lounge in the booth despite the guns pointed at him. There’s a quiet confidence in his bearing. He’s loose, relaxed—but she knows, as certain as she is about her own identity, that Bucky Barnes is no less lethal than Drakov. 

His military record as one of the first snipers ever speaks for itself. 

Hood, perfectly steadily, sets the guns down. “You really are Bucky Fucking Barnes.” 

“If you say so,” Drakov—Bucky—agrees amiably. “Some people like to say that we’re a summary of our experiences, so therefore I’m more _Soldat_ and Drakov than I am Bucky—but sure, we can go with Bucky.” 

“Do you know how not-reassuring that is?” Hood says, but he’s at least half-amused about it. 

“Yes.” 

“I don’t think that Bucky Barnes, even without the Winter Soldier conditioning, was all that good at reassurances. I don’t think that Steve Rogers Wrangler would be a good training exercise for reassurance,” Natasha says. 

“No, the reassurances came from being a big brother to three little sisters,” he says. 

“He’s better at skinned knees and pulled hair than saying that he’s not going to fling himself at someone with murderous intent,” Natasha says. 

She breathes a little easier when this, at least, gets Hood to actually laugh. His shoulders finally relax a little. 

“Let me guess,” he says with the long-suffering of someone who _knows_ , “the kids twelve and under mob you, and everyone eighteen and over run like they managed to get on her shit list.” He nods in her direction when he says ‘her shit list’. 

Drakov—Bucky—laughs a little. It’s a quiet, wry thing. “I’m perpetually terrified that I’ll twitch too hard and accidentally hip-check someone into a wall.” 

Natasha remembers Drakov’s careful coaching and gentle praise and the discipline he instilled in her. She remembers the sheer amount of reading between the lines that she’s done in the last two nights and how, undeniably, Hood’s focus is the kids of Gotham. 

The kids of Gotham that survive on Gotham’s streets are smart as whips, wary as hell, and have an uncanny ability to read the trustworthiness of sketchy people—but set Captain America in front of them, and they all give him a six-foot berth. Drakov and Hood are of similar build, similar pasts, and could be legitimately terrifying in a New York setting. 

The kids of Gotham will always know the marshmallow core that they alone can get to. 

Her? The kids will come to her if they need help immediately, but if Hood or even Drakov is an option, she knows that the kids will pick one of them every last time. 

“I’m changing the subject a little,” Hood says after a lightning fast nod of agreement to the afraid-of-hip-checking-someone statement. “And I don’t mind you telling me no. If you remember—how in _hell_ did you become a sniper with the piece of shit that they handed you as Bucky Barnes?” 

Out of the corner of her eye, Natasha spots Drakov run his flesh hand over his hair absentmindedly, thinking. “I don’t mind the question,” he says slowly. “I. Uh. Don’t remember, really. I remember caring for it like it was my own baby thirty miles behind enemy lines.” 

Hood waits a minute. “One of the books said that you got to Sargent almost immediately because of your range scores.” 

“Two hundred feet,” he says immediately. “Cakewalk to what I shoot nowadays.” 

Natasha suppresses the shit-eating smirk that wants to crawl onto her face. “Steve Rogers Wrangler improved his hand-eye coordination to peak human levels long before he ever got the serum,” she says to Hood as deadpan as possible. 

Drakov immediately elbows her so hard she has to brace her hand against the booth next to her as she lets the smirk free. 

“You laugh!” he accuses her. “But that’s the only reasonable explanation I’ve heard yet!” 

“His grandpappy was a vampire and the genes only activated fully when he got shot up with discount super soldier serum,” Natasha offers. “But he got the eyesight before then.” 

“You would not say that about grandpappy if you’d met him,” Drakov muttered. “It woulda given him _i_ _d_ _e_ _a_ _s_.” 

“1940’s drinking water was just that bad and formed mutant, troublemaking, improbably-surviving soldiers,” she says. 

“I boiled that shit, I ain’t feeding that to Stevie,” he retorts. 

“They still had lead pipes,” she stage-whispers to Hood. “It was a lost cause anyway.” 

“Jokes on you, we didn’t have running water half the time,” Drakov retorts. 

“I feel like I should be alarmed, but I’m getting dinner and a show,” Hood says. 

Dawn shows up with her and Drakov’s orders on cue with Hood’s drink and a refill for Natasha. 

She takes the moment with all the shuffling to study Hood. The kid is far more comfortable after watching her and Drakov be absolute children. She’s glad; she’d hate to start laughing if she had to watch Hood try to eat a burger with a gun in his hand. 

Then he steals one of her fries, and instead of doing what she would have done to Drakov or any of the other Avengers—which was leap across the table and give him a noogie that would inevitably result in a wrestling match on the floor of the dining room—she gives him a playful mean mug and scooches the basket closer and wraps her arms around it. 

“You put your hair in your ketchup, Natenshka,” Drakov helpfully says. 

She scowls at Drakov as Hood chokes on a laugh. She reaches for a napkin. 

Oh well. She’s willing to sacrifice her reputation if it means that he can laugh. 

Hood’s food arrives in short order, right as she’s sure that she got all of the ketchup out of her hair. He got waffles and enough eggs and hashbrowns to create a mound. 

Natasha checks her watch. It’s rapidly edging towards one o’clock in the morning. It’s officially her fourth day in Gotham. “Does this count as midnight snack or first breakfast?” she asks. 

“This is second breakfast,” he says, immediately digging into the eggs and hashbrowns after salting and peppering them. 

“What is the chili dog that I see you get, then?” she asks. 

“Midnight snack,” he says. 

“Nocturnal vigilantes,” she sighs and digs into her burger. “Oh, by the way, Hood.” She swallows the bite and continues, “I did some digging a few hours ago on the League of Shadows.” 

He nods and gives her a, “yeah, and?” look. 

“Talia al Ghul,” she pauses, simply for the weight of the name, “is one ballsy bitch if she’s the person I think she is.” 

Natasha has the extreme pleasure of watching Hood inhale his eggs laughing. 

“That is the most apt description I’ve ever heard for her,” he says, shaking his head. “Heir to the League of Shadows and she and Batman still had at least two separate flings that I know of. Ra’s was _pissed_. There’s still evidence of him trying to take Batman’s head off for touching his daughter over in the Diamond District, of all places.” 

Natasha most _definitely_ would have inhaled something if anything had been in her mouth, because _Batman_ having a fling with the daughter of a mortal enemy—or an immortal enemy, as it was—is _hysterical._ “I need to do more research,” she says flatly. How in _hell_ did she miss that? 

“Oh no, that wouldn’t come up anywhere,” Hood reassures her. “Gotham native source only.” 

“What’s this about Talia al Ghul?” Drakov says, munching on a fry. 

“You and I were Red Room,” Natasha says. “Talia and Hood were whatever version of League of Shadows that would be equivalent.” 

Drakov stops, mid-munch, and does an up-and-down of Hood. Then, resuming his munching, “Mm. Have fun, Natenshka.” 

Natasha’s grin at his blessing is slightly better than a wolf baring its bloodstained teeth. She chuckles a little on the inside when she spots Hood’s pulse jump a little. He’s still got the half-wary, half-amused look on his face, though, and it appears genuine.

Drakov’s answering smirk is no less terrifying, and it’s a wonderful comfort after twenty-five years without it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was not planning on Bucky showing up. Like. At all.
> 
> I have a lot of headcanons for Bucky and Natasha, but the most prominent one that may have either stood out/caused heart attacks/confused people is the name _Drakov_. There was a whole Tumblr post on why they wouldn't have called Bucky Yasha as the Winter Soldier, because Yasha was a very Jewish name and the Jewish community was super looked down upon at the time (possibly still to today, I'm not sure, my family isn't from Russia)--plus, you know, the direct correlation between Yasha and Jacob/James. So instead of going that route, they called him Drakov. I don't know why Drakov specifically for him, but in MCU, when Loki is listing Natasha's crimes, he mentions, "Drakov's daughter...the hospital fire," and idk about you, but being personally trained by and then being an attachment and attached to Drakov--the American judicial system is all kinds of screwed and they _definitely_ would have considered her being his daughter (by blood, by attachment, by training, by partnership, it doesn't matter) a crime, or at least an accessory to it.

**Author's Note:**

> So. Y'all. I've watched one (1) Batman movie, and there was not a single mention of any children or Robins. I fell into the fandom through I-don't-even-know (that's not a username, that means that I don't know what got me into the fandom) and fell in love with the character that is Jason Todd. And then I fell in love with Jason and Talia's dynamic, especially as son and mother. But the thing is, apparently That One Thing Happened that no one in the fandom really talks about. And so mother and son dynamic gets creepy, a bit. But most every author basically pretends it never happened, so mother and son dynamic is okay. So I was listening to "How Did You Love" by Shinedown and got thumped over the head with Muse and Natasha Romanov. And then I said to myself, "Self, Natasha is capable. She's done the same thing that Jason just went through. He needs a stabilizing influence, even if he's doing fairly well on his own. Natasha is probably the most level-headed of the Avengers. Plus, I'm used to writing her."
> 
> And then, whoops, I wrote over 2K in an hour. For a fandom that I've never done before. So this will be interesting. *scratches head* If someone has insights into Jason's character, please, for the love of all that is holy, speak up. I need help.
> 
> (Also, I have a tumblr now!! :) You can find me here:
> 
> [rubythecrimsonwriter](https://rubythecrimsonwriter.tumblr.com/)
> 
> )


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